How did you get it to use the external display in the first place? It should boot into Win7 on the internal monitor, if that was what was installed when you got it.

I'd look at the top row of keys, as this is where the switch between displays often is (symbols in blue?), often with a special function shift key on the left side. My Acer Aspire One doesn't have a special function key, but does have display related symbols on F5 F6 - usually have to read the manual to work out how to use them.

Another place to look is in the command line parameters used to boot Ubuntu.

Ram wrote:Alex explain your problem better. what do you mean when your out?

Laptop boots up to the grub screen and is giving you a choice of OS to boot into... so what is your problem?

At what point are you using the usb hard drive, when getting home ?

When I am out out, ie when I take my laptop round to a friends or something, ie when it is not connected to an external vga monitor, it's booting to the grub screen, but for some reason the grub screen is being displayed on the external screen and the laptop screen is blank. My Linux partition as a few issues at the mo so is booting to a command prompt - rootshell but cannot see anything.

If I put my usb gig stick in, and reboot the laptop it works, but then I am running a live session of Ubuntu Studio 64 bit 12.10 which is not ideal. Also my usb stick is now not working at the mo now so big probs here!!! Life shouldn't be this difficult!!!!!